Priya Ravichandran

Watching a middle aged white guy do a perfect Michael Jackson impersonation is the best thing you’ll see today.🤣 H/T: Shaun Johnson @ Johnsonfiles

Finally captured the moment when two red-crowned cranes met and danced gracefully, truly worth my long wait in the snow!

Admiral Yamamoto, seen here realizing he’d totally forgot to tell Trump he was going to attack Pearl Harbor.

This is the front page of today’s @timesofindia. Count the number of avoidable deaths.

The role Israel played in the Tamil genocide and Sri Lanka’s relationship with Tel Aviv stretches back many decades and is worth many millions of dollars. Important reading from @eitaymack for @thewire_in. #lka #srilanka #tamil #eelam #genocide

The point is the spotlight should have been on the players—Indian, Kiwis, and everyone else who played. Instead the attention is on someone who governs all of cricket. He can be happy, but not a limelite hog.

“It’s not normal or healthy for the guy responsible for global cricket to celebrate like that.”

😐

Coimbatore-based famous Annapoorna Restaurant MD Srinivasan tells me on @IndiaToday that the restaurant requires around 200 LPG cylinders per day but currently has stocks that will last only 2–3 days before running out completely. To conserve gas, the management has decided to limit menu offerings and tweak availability timings. #Coimbatore

The Iranians are saying that any Arab or European country that expels the ambassadors of Israel and the United States from its territory will, starting from tomorrow have full authority and freedom to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

🚨 This tortoise was born before the first photograph of a human face was ever taken. He watched the entire industrial revolution happen. He was already middle aged when electricity became a household concept. Every person who has ever driven a car, flown in a plane, or used a telephone was born and died while Jonathan kept eating grass on the island of Saint Helena. The biological reason he’s still alive is arguably more disturbing than the timeline. Tortoises like Jonathan don’t age the way mammals do. Their cells show almost zero increase in mortality rate as years pass. A 150 year old tortoise has roughly the same statistical chance of dying in a given year as a 50 year old one. Scientists call this “negligible senescence” and it essentially means his body forgot to receive the memo that aging leads to death. His telomeres, the protective caps on chromosomes that fray and shorten in humans with each cell division, degrade at a rate so slow it barely registers. While your body is actively dismantling itself through the oxidative stress of simply breathing and metabolizing, Jonathan’s metabolic rate runs so low his cells accumulate almost no damage across decades. He is not surviving despite time. His biology treats time as largely irrelevant. Jonathan has outlived every single human who was alive when he was born. Every philosopher, tyrant, artist, and revolutionary from his birth year is dust. He shared the planet with Napoleon. He is still here. The oldest verified human ever lived to 122. Jonathan is 194. He has now lived longer than our entire concept of a long human life, twice over.

Pope Leo XIV’s Vatican newspaper is the only publication in the Western world to run the photograph of 150 Iranian girls' graves — killed in President Trump's military strikes — on its front page.

I’m an Indian. I love this country. And I’m absolutely ashamed of what BCCI and this government have done to my favourite sport. Let’s talk facts, not feelings. Jay Shah; son of Home Minister Amit Shah, widely considered the 2nd most powerful man in India; left the BCCI Secretary post the moment he became ICC Chairman. A man directly connected to the ruling government now runs the WORLD governing body of cricket. And nobody in Indian media dares say it out loud: this is the single biggest conflict of interest in the history of sport. Under his watch: ➡️ Mustafizur Rahman was dumped from KKR; not for bad performance, but because India-Bangladesh relations soured. A player’s LIVELIHOOD destroyed for political signalling. ➡️ India refused to play Pakistan in Pakistan. ICC bent. Hybrid model forced. Then Bangladesh dared ask for the SAME treatment for T20 WC matches in India, and suddenly the ICC threatened THEM with warnings. One rule for India. Zero rules for everyone else. ➡️ India’s players refused to shake hands with Pakistan at the Asia Cup 2025. The ICC; the same body that bans players for “bringing the game into disrepute”, looked the other way. Senior journalist Sharda Ugra called BCCI under Jay Shah synonymous with BJP’s increasing control over cricket. The Caravan called him “The Home Minister of the ICC.” DW, Al Jazeera, The Telegraph, The Wire; every credible global outlet is saying what our own press is scared to print. Cricket once brought India and Pakistan to the table. It once made enemies shake hands at the boundary. The Wire said it best; BCCI has “rendered cricket useless for the diplomatic purposes it once served.” From Kapil Dev lifting a World Cup with zero political baggage… to THIS. A sport reduced to a BJP foreign policy instrument. A World Cup reduced to a BCCI boardroom negotiation. The ICC reduced to, in Sharda Ugra’s words: “the Dubai office of the BCCI.” I love India. I love cricket. That’s exactly WHY this makes me furious. We didn’t deserve this, and neither did cricket. Fix the board. Save the sport. 🏏 #INDvNZ #T20WorldCupFinal

Along the coast of Tamil Nadu, in the waters of Ramanathapuram, particularly around Pamban, Keelakarai and Ervadi over 300 traditionally skilled fisherwomen dive into the sea everyday to earn for their families. Setting out in groups of eight to ten by boat before sunrise, they skin-dive up to depths of 4–5 metres, hand-picking seaweed from the seabed and gathering it in mesh bags known locally as kacha. By the time they return to shore around 1 p.m., each woman brings back 10–12 bags of seaweed, with each bag weighing 20–25 kilograms. Their labour sustains their families supporting children’s education, and household needs. Government of Tamil Nadu, under the TN-SHORE Project, is designing a Village Enterprise Model working with them to strengthen their enterprise, build value chains and empower them economically. This Women’s Day, we salute these seaweed gatherers of Tamil Nadu, truly courageous women who inspire 🫡 #InternationalWomensDay2026 #WomensDay2026 #WomensDay @tnforestdept @tnclimatechange

It’s not a war unless it comes from the war region of France, otherwise’s it’s just sparkling combat.

@radhikasan Congratulations! This is some joy in the middle of dreary news. Looking forward to all good things literary!

Thrilled to be The Hindu's new Books Editor (non fiction), commissioning reviews and interviews, in addition to other roles. Do email me with ideas, suggestions, and pitches: radhika.s@thehindu.co.in And here is the my first books newsletter - do subscribe! thehindu.com/newsletter/the…

Everyone’s missing the real story here. Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses need human data annotators to train the AI. When you say “Hey Meta” and ask the glasses to analyze something, that video gets sent to Meta’s servers, then routed to Sama, a subcontractor in Nairobi, Kenya. Workers there manually label objects in your footage. They see everything you recorded, intentionally or not. 7 million pairs sold in 2025 alone. Every single pair generates training data that flows through human eyes in Kenya. Workers told Swedish journalists they see people undressing, using bathrooms, having sex, and accidentally filming bank card details. One worker said “we see everything, from living rooms to naked bodies.” Meta’s automatic face anonymization is supposed to protect people in the footage. Workers say it fails in certain lighting. Faces that should be blurred are sometimes fully visible. The person you recorded without knowing? A stranger in Nairobi can identify them. Buried in Meta’s terms of service is one sentence doing enormous legal work: the company reserves the right to conduct “manual (human) review” of your AI interactions. That’s the legal cover for routing intimate footage from Western homes to a $2/hour labor force operating under NDAs, office surveillance cameras, and a strict no-questions policy. Workers say if you raise concerns about what you’re seeing, you’re fired. This is the same company, Sama, that TIME exposed in 2023 for paying Kenyan workers $2/hour to label graphic content for OpenAI while being billed at $12.50/hour per worker. Workers described the experience as torture. Sama ended that contract, then pivoted to labeling Meta’s glasses footage. Same workforce. Same rates. Meta markets these glasses as “designed with your privacy in mind.” The privacy design is a tiny LED light on the frame that most people don’t notice. The data pipeline behind it routes your bedroom footage to a contractor with a documented history of worker exploitation, failed anonymization, and union-busting lawsuits. And the next generation of these glasses? Meta is planning to add facial recognition. The same system that can’t reliably blur faces in training data wants to start identifying them on purpose. The LED light on the frame is doing about as much for your privacy as the terms of service nobody reads.

This is nuts! GLP-1 can reduce joint pain and reverse cartilage damage. But it also stops you from falling in love and represses romantic cravings. How little we know about these drugs, but how massive an influence they have on our lives. Flabbers are gasted!

what every day feels like now